The increasing complexity of the marketplace has made it increasingly important for business persons to assimilate large volumes of information efficiently. Business and industry are increasingly challenged to quickly and efficiently administer, record, account for and analyze the changing attributes of those things that they produce, service, maintain, market, sell and administer. Typically, the most effective method of presentating data is graphically, using pictures and charts.
Statistical analysis software programs that receive sets of input data and output histograms, pie charts and line graphs are well known. There are many business decisions for which these presentation methods do not provide the information in a form that is quickly and easily understood by the business person.
Powerful microprocessors have made user-friendly Man-Machine Interfaces (MMIs) practical. Fourth generation programming tools have been developed to facilitate the development and maintentance of software.
The InTouch.TM. software development toolkit by the Wonderware Corporation of Irvine, Calif., is an MMI application generator for supervisory control, monitoring and data acquisition applications in an MS Windows environment.
InTouch.TM. provides the capability to develop graphics which are embedded within the MMI application as "smart objects." The objects may be connected to desired data values in a spreadsheet. "Action scripts" may be invoked for "change of state" conditions, upon opening of windows, or occurrence of an alarm condition. Alarms may be assigned, causing a portion of the display to change color. In Touch uses a proprietary extension of the Data Exchange data transfer mechanism to connect spreadsheets or databases to the MMI applications.
Application software developers require additional tools for quickly and easily developing portable MMI application programs. In particular, tools are required for displaying each type of data in the format that is most easily understood. These tools must be simple enough for the developers to master quickly, but capable of producing graphical output displays having a virtually unlimited variety of formats.
The end users of these applications require the data in a format that they can readily understand. For example, the operators of trucking fleets must track large quantities of information about tires. Tire expenses are typically among the highest costs for a trucking fleet. Tire wear and age must be tracked. The number of times that an individual tire has been retread must be tracked. Repairs for each truck in the fleet that may influence tire wear should be tracked. Special repairs performed on an individual tire must be tracked. The fleet operator should be able to compare the cost effectiveness of products made by different tire manufacturers, and of different brands made by a single manufacturer. For each tire, the fleet operator should be able to predict an expected time for retreading or replacing the tire, both to schedule maintenance operations and to budget for the repair and replacement expenses. The inventors are not aware of any automated system in the prior art meeting the needs of truck fleet operators.
Fleet operators need automated tools for managing their tires. Software developers need a development toolkit that facilitates the development of such a system.